I'll talk to Mark about approving the response vid (he was prolly asleep when you posted it)

BTW I found an interesting nugget of info when I was looking up the PDC sticker on the R30 Silhouette. Google Translate can be a bit funky when it comes to Japanese, but I'm pretty sure I found a couple of references which said that the Nissan PDC sticker was a campaign to "Get Skyline Back To The Circuit".

Fans would buy the PDC stickers (which are available as repro now) for Y1000, and the cashola went into a fund to buy a new engine for the race team (or something). I'll look into it some more, but if anyone has any intel, please do share

BTW I found an interesting nugget of info when I was looking up the PDC sticker on the R30 Silhouette. Google Translate can be a bit funky when it comes to Japanese, but I'm pretty sure I found a couple of references which said that the Nissan PDC sticker was a campaign to "Get Skyline Back To The Circuit".

Fans would buy the PDC stickers (which are available as repro now) for Y1000, and the cashola went into a fund to buy a new engine for the race team (or something). I'll look into it some more, but if anyone has any intel, please do share

I think you've got the gist of it there, Kev.

Basically, some of the motorsports-minded dealerships were lobbying the factory about getting more involved in racing the Skyline again. At the time, Nissan was still being quite reticent about this. They'd been concentrating on racing smaller - economy - models since the 'Oil Shock' hit, and this was the fallout, and indeed the sportiest of the R30 range wasn't exactly the most glamorous of Skylines for them to sell in comparison to the glories of past series. The dealers wanted a new homologation special to sell, and a new works Skyline race campaign for their sales to bask in the reflected glory of. The upshot was the R31 GTS-R homologation model, and - ultimately - the BNR32.

The Nissan PDC campaign carried on, and morphed into the 'PAss' campaign ( 'Prince Autosport dealers SponsorShip' ) which backed the works R32 GT-Rs that were entered for the 24hrs of Spa Francorchamps, and which did so well. Funny to think that it was the dealers, organising the general public at grass roots level, which succeeded in helping to bring the Skyline back to the track in works guise.

Just in case anyone had thought that I'd forgotten about this car.. I haven't been doing much work on it lately, but it is getting driven a lot, so don't worry I haven't forgotten about it

One recent little project I had was to replace the rather patinated old Omori oil pressure gauge. Sure, it still worked fine, but was looking a little beaten up, and having had the Omori water temp gauge (that came with the car) fail on me, I thought I'd do an upgrade.

Being an Omori, it's a mechanical gauge, which means that there is a tube that runs from the engine block...

...inside the car and right to the back of the gauge. The oil inside the tube pushes on a diaphragm, which then pushes the needle around the gauge. Very simple and interestingly, the tube doesn't get hot at all, even though there is a small amount of engine oil inside it.

The replacement is this, an electronic VDO gauge, which doesn't use the oil-tube system, but rather has an electronic sender.

The sender screws to the side of the block, and you wire it up to the back of the gauge.

Wiring up the gauge was pretty easy, a long time ago I fitted one of these Narva mini fuseboxes. I run a main power wire to it that's switched to ACC on the key, and whenever you need an accessory power source, you just pop in a blade fuse and plug in a wire. Very convenient for things like wiring up gauges, wideband sensors and stuff.

And without further ado, the VDO gauge burst into life!

The elation was short-lived though, because as the oil got hot, the idle oil pressure began to drop to zero. And the oil pressure on the move dropped from a max of 55psi to 35psi.

This had never happened before, so I suspected that the VDO sender was a dud....sure enough, with the old Omori re-fitted, hot idle oil pressure returned to 15psi (as it should be for an L-series) and on the move, max pressure was 55psi, whether hot or cold.

From chatting with our esteemed Technical Editor John, it seems that electronic pressure gauges aren't as accurate as mechanical ones like the Omori, but this sender was clearly a dud, and VDO seems to have a problem with their stock. This dud one is actually the second sender I bought. The first one was new and boxed, but was obviously used, since the threads were oily and it had bits of thread tape on it I handed that back to the shop straight away, and they ordered me a new one, but I get the feeling that someone is playing silly buggers, and is replacing bad ones for good and returning them to the shop. Oh well, I guess this is a sign from the resto-gods that the Omori is meant to stay

The other thing that I did recently was something I had wanted for a long time. A real 2000GT-R looks like this inside (I took this pic at the Tokyo Nostalgic Show a few years ago):

The 2000GT-R, even though it was twice as expensive as the most expensive "normal" Skyline of the day, was a real stripped out, basic motorsport homologation car. It had no heater, no carpets (just the taxi-pack vinyl mat)...and no radio. It just had this plate over where the Hitachi radio normally lives. When I fitted the Becker Europa stereo last year, I was pretty stoked with how it looked...but it always grated on me that I had this redundant radio at the top of the dash, too. The slot at the top of the dash wasn't DIN-sized, so moving the Becker up there wasn't an option.

Now when I first bought my car in 2007, I remember that all the restoration shops offered the 2000GT-R radio blanking plate as a repro. But by the time I realised I wanted one, they were all gone. Luckily, the repros are being made again, and I snapped one up from Yahoo Auctions, thanks to my friend Ryan. And what a beautiful looking thing it is.

Fitting it isn't the work of a moment though. First you have to remove the old radio, which means that the centre stack has to come out. So it begins with delicately removing all the knobs from the ventilation controls and radio.

Remove a few retaining nuts from the radio and fan knobs..

Undo the cables that run from the ventilation controls to the heater box, remove a few screws and the centre stack can slide off

Then the radio has to be removed (it's located by a single screw on the side, which you can just about access from under the dash)

And out that comes too.

The radio plate just screws in place through the holes left by the radio controls, and it looks just great!

The 2000GT-R, even though it was twice as expensive as the most expensive "normal" Skyline of the day, was a real stripped out, basic motorsport homologation car. It had no heater, no carpets (just the taxi-pack vinyl mat)...and no radio. It just had this plate over where the Hitachi radio normally lives.

Great update as always Kev, but can I just point out one thing?

You're right that the basic spec of the C10-series GT-Rs included no heater / blower / demister, carpets or radio - but that was the basic spec, and prospective purchasers could, if they paid extra, specifiy them on a new car at time of order. In this way, quite a few GT-Rs did end up with the full heater / blower / demister and/or the radio. My KPGC10 was one of them.....

My car lost its heater / blower / demister some time back when it became more track-oriented, and to be honest I could do with having it back! The radio on the other hand I can live without.....

Since we've decided to keep the old Omori gauge, I decided to tidy up something. You see, when the Japanese owner decided to deck out the whole car with a million gauges...

They had to make room for all those Omori tubes to feed through the firewall. So they took a cold chisel...and made this er...anatomically curious hole The thing is, it protrudes 7mm from the firewall, so putting a flat plate over it won't work, and the funny shape of the er...hole...means that a grommet won't fit neatly into it.

Years ago, after I removed most of the gauges, I plugged up the (now gaping) hole with this rubber mushroom, and it's done the job for a long time. But now that we're keeping the Omori, I thought I'd make a bit more of an effort So I start with a piece of 1mm aluminium

And this, my bead roller. I've had it for a few years, but don't use it much.

It comes with a set of different rollers, and when you feed sheetmetal through it and turn a handle on the end, it can roll a round bead (like say for the ends of intercooler pipes) or a step like this. The kit comes with a few different sized steps, and this is the medium-sized one:

I start off with rolling a shallow step.

Then I put on the biggest stepped rollers, and if I space them apart a little, and pull down on the left side of the sheetmetal as I roll it, you get this nice, domed shape. I'll be the first to admit that there's definitely a knack to using one of these, and I'm just making this up as I go along...so if anyone has tips on how to do it properly, they would be welcome

After it's shaped, I rough out the shape I want with tinsnips, then clean up the edges on the belt sander, and then a little with a handfile for the bits the belt sander couldn't reach.

Then make a central hole with a step drill...

Pop in a rubber grommet, and give it a big of a polish (not necessarily in that order...)

And here we are!

I'm thinking it looks a little...rustic... but it'll do the job until i figure out how to use the bead roller properly. It's mostly hidden behind the brake booster hose anyhoo